Prior research has shown that explicitly stimulating experiences that lead to failure can help raise learning outcomes. Sinha & Kapur (2021) extended the previous findings by investigating whether explicit failure-driven scaffolding prior to formal instruction would be advantageous in understanding new content and its underlying principles.

The study was divided into three segments: a problem-solving phase, an instruction phase, and a posttest, consisting of questionnaires/tests For the problem-solving phase, participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups: success-driven, failure-driven, and productive-failure, where each group received its respective form of scaffolding. In the success-driven group, participants were given prompts and hints that directed them toward the correct answer. In the failure-driven group, participants were given suboptimal, or loosely-related information, that challenged them to reason with the given information. In the productive-failure group, participants were given no explicit scaffolding at all.

During the instruction phase, participants were introduced to a math concept, called Anscombe’s Quartet, through a series of three videos. Using their scaffolding experience from the problem-solving phase, participants took isomorphic, non-isomorphic, and transfer tests during the posttest phase.

Analysis from the questionnaires and tests revealed that although students in the failure-driven group had an initial dip in performance during the problem-solving phase, they had the highest reasoning qualities for all phases, and returned the highest score for their transfer post-test. Their ability to fluently explain their solutions and reason their rationale allowed them to think about the interconnections between new and existing knowledge. As a result, they successfully applied prior knowledge into a new context.

On the other hand, the success-driven group reported the lowest reasoning quality. They also had the highest performance during the problem-solving phase because they were geared towards the correct answer, but they reported the lowest scores on the transfer posttest. The discrepancy demonstrated that scores did not reliably reflect a student’s ability to transfer knowledge to novel situations. The findings implicated that high performance was not indicative of deep knowledge of the content or its underlying domain principles.

In short, Sinha & Kapur’s (2021) study supported prior findings that failure-driven experiences can foster students’ ability to deeply understand the content and apply it in novel contexts. The researchers suggested that future research in this field could guide students’ content comprehension and improve their metacognition of what they know and do not know about the given content.

Findings from this study inform EPIC by explicating the impact that failure has on students. It helps us to potentially understand how students work to “recover” from failure. It also provides details on the role of metacognition in applying what a student has learned into new contexts, such as exams or in different subjects.

For a deeper understanding of this study, retrieve it at: 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959475221000475

Reference:

Sinha, T. & Kapur, M. (2021). Robust effects of the efficacy of explicit failure-driven scaffolding in problem-solving prior to instruction: A replication and extension. Learning and Instruction, 75, 101488.